A day in the life of a Middle Manager...

Surname Profile

Found this amazing website yesterday but it wasn't working due to a massive spike in traffic. Managed to get onto it this morning and dig out some fascinating info about my surname and its distribution round the UK.

For instance, for every million people in the UK only 19 are Knipes. I'd always believed that it was a North West (specifically Lancashire) name too and this was borne out by this website...

They must be getting lots of interest because of the current series of Who do you think you are.

If you have even the slightest interest in the distribution of your surname around the UK you should check this site out!

Where do you come from? ;-)

I sense a disturbance in the force...

WARNING: All the below is complete conjecture on my part and may just be paranoid or deluded ramblings! ;-)

Hmmmm.... Interesting.

As many of you will know MWSF brought the usual $HINY new toys for all lovers of his Steveness' company. These included the new i(ntel)Mac and the long-awaited replacement for the Powerbook, the MacBook Pro (which I expect at least one friend of mine to be toting round next time I see him - me, I can wait until rev B or C) as well as various software packages.

Something didn't feel quite right with the Keynote speech though and I didn't put my finger on it until I watched it recently - what the heck was Steve doing spending SO much time on software when he said about 10 minutes in to the speech that the rest of the keynote was about the Mac? It felt well... Empty! It felt like he'd had to leave stuff out at the last minute. I get the feeling something's coming and the new macs at MWSF were just pilotfish (come on, gotta love the Dr. Who references here!)

Another thing that bugged me was when the Microsoft Mac Business Unit did their bit - they only committed to the next 5 years and then only with Office. This has definitely caused a ripple in the force with me. I get the feeling MS, while understanding they are dominant, have decided that the Mac (and specifically OS X) is becoming a bit of a threat. They have pulled back from the Mac quite a bit recently quoting "business prioritisation" within the Mac Business Unit. In other words guys, the Mac BU is getting scaled back.

As announced recently they are no longer providing any new versions of Windows Media Player for the Mac (and I know, WMP sucks but there's too much content out there to ignore it). Instead, they are promoting Telestream's Flip4Mac Quicktime plugin which used to cost $10 but is now available as a basic plugin for free. Unfortunately (for me at least) this plugin works pretty badly (i.e., it doesn't work at all and causes safari to crash) when you try to get some content from the CTV website in 'high' bandwidth mode - go back to 'dialup' mode and it works fine. It is obviously a problem with the plugin as this works perfectly with WMP.

As Mac users will know, MS also dumped IE for Mac (which really sucked anyway) and shelved plans for MSN for Mac. The only products they're talking about providing are Office and MSN Messenger. There are no definitive plans for Virtual PC either.

I really do get the feeling that MS have decided to attempt to strangle OS X before it gets a real foothold.

Vista must be a real mess if they're getting even half as worried as I get the feeling they are...

Another Mac user!

J decided he'd had enough of my not knowing how to do something so decided to show me himself! Nothing like starting young... ;-)

Awesome but slightly depressing...

One of the things I've been doing recently is encoding our entire CD collection to MP3 (well, actually AAC). This has taken a long time (a few weeks, on and off) but is now almost complete.

It really is very very cool to have your entire CD and song collection available on your computer (a mac in this case) so you can listen to whatever you want whenever you want without having to fiddle around both finding the CD in the collection then getting the CD out.

However, I just cannot be the only person who finds it slightly depressing to see their entire collection - lovingly bought over several years and consisting of over 500 CDs and currently taking up an entire cabinet that is around 3½ feet tall by about 2 feet wide - compressed into half a 60GB iPod!

I love technology but this is truly amazing. At the bit-rate I encode (192 AAC VBR) the entire collection is slightly less than 30GB and can fit into my pocket and I really cannot tell the difference between the original CD and the encoded version.

Amazing to think that even a few years ago the technology to do this would have been almost unthinkable then along came MP3s and now AAC. I tend to ignore WMA simply because it is a proprietary format and MP3 and AAC are not.

On another note, I know I haven't blogged much (and believe me, I get constant ribbing from SWMBO about it). Perhaps this year I'll find things to blog about - you never know! :-)